Microsoft's carbon emissions up nearly 30% thanks to AI

Fuck it, if we're dumb/selfish enough to be doing this, let's get it over with.

Good luck dolphin people! My only advice, if you have any dolphins incessantly trying to claim more resources for themselves than all the other dolphins, beat the ever loving shit out of them and nip that in the bud.

If someone wants to start the revolution, I'm all in. I just can't exactly do much by myself, and I'm bad at networking.
- I have a feeling there is a very large number of people just waiting for the shoe to drop
Or here's a much better idea; strap yourself to the dolphin so when they leave, you get to come with. Make sure you bribe them with fish.

I wish I had a decent explanation. But instead, I have Windows 11’s shiny new Taskbar configuration menu that politely warns me that showing seconds on the clock takes more power. Right under the “Show Copilot” button.

These fucks are fucked.

Does it actually tell you that seconds on the clock takes more power?

Edit: Lol it actually says "(uses more power)"
- But ads do not, so don't worry!
They are like a big coal-rolling tractor trailer rumbling past somebody on an e-bike and shaking their finger at you because you could be pedaling right now to save minuscule amounts of energy.

Telling others to conserve is free. They themselves conserving could potentially mean less money!
First time I read in windows update "we are commited to reduce co2 emissions" I was like "wtf".
Reminder that because the Windows 11 taskbar is slower and buggier than the Windows 10 taskbar, it uses much more power due to the extra CPU cycles.

Right when we literally need to chill, they keep inventing nonsense that is somehow worse. Crypto is literally just machines wasting energy on purpose to create false scarcity, it was already a worst case scenario for truly pointless excess emissions but by god, they managed to top it, this place is going to be a raisin with dead oceans.

Of course, anyone who does anything less than suck the dick of this AI is a reactionary ignorant peasant, at least with crypto everyone agreed it was lame, now we're back to the iPhone fuck-you-only-change-allowed-keep-up-granny bullshit that lead to everyone but you knowing everything about you, so they can exploit and even criminalize the behavior your phone tells them about. Never the change we need, though. Just whatever makes your stupid line go up.

I guess. Glad I'm not having kids. That's the only fucking downward pressure on future emissions that's happening, on any meaningful scale. I can't wait to see what sort of shitty boilerplate copy and fake fucking pictures makes all this CO2 worthwhile. I'm sure the problem is me, and my Luddite, unseasoned irrational fear.

I agree with your first two paragraphs.

The third, well, it’s your choice to choose not to have children. That’s fine and I understand. But people shouldn’t feel obligated not to get children to save the climate.

Not that you’re suggesting that, just clarifying.
- I'm not about to say people can't have kids, but they should really do their best to truly understand the future that awaits those kids. That temperature line is going to keep going up (except in certain areas when the AMOC collapses). Things will be worse and no one is coming to save us. Deciding to bring a new life into that future is a serious ethical and moral choice.
Permanently Deleted
- I'd love to see any evidence or logical arguments that an inflationary economy is worse than a deflationary one.
People on here are straight up brain washed, even more than on reddit... Good on you for not having kids though, you're making society a favor, just for different reason than you think.
- I tried to wash my brain, but I couldn't find enough clean water
- 1 kid = 60 vegetarian conversions.

CEOs: AI will help us lower our carbon emissions!

CEOs when they actually get their hands on AI:

Something nobody wants helping destroy something everyone needs.

All to do what? Write emails and generate mediocre pictures?

The usefulness of AI currently is not much better than predictive text.

Oh it's far more useful than that. It's the shiny new thing that's going to make a lot of money for shareholders
- Only if they have a killer app that people are willing to pay for...
Ahaha, yes, exactly, because it is essentially just a turbo charged text predictor with 40GB (or more) of data.
Hey, hey, now! It doesn't just write full emails from merely a single sentence... it also summarizes full emails down to one sentence on the other end.
- I didn't even realize it could do that! I'm going to use this on emails from HR to translate them to simple English sentences.
  
  "No raises this year because greed"
  
  "We want you to work Saturdays now"
I really hope that on-device AI becomes competitive soon. It’s nice to see that on-device is the way large portions of the industry is going, but cloud AI just uses way too much energy. Not to mention the resources required to manufacture millions of large-die GPUs.

It’s probably naive to think that the corporations that created this problem will solve it, but it honestly seems like the most feasible path forward in the near term. I certainly don’t expect the world’s governments to be effective at regulating AI any time soon.
It's a fun tool for creative writing at least

Humanity and general AI only had a single interaction in history, on July 24, 2042, when GPT-8 first gained sentience.

Knowing the press would memorialize this moment forever, the prompt engineer had a single question in mind which she typed into the terminal:

How can humanity solve climate change?

GPT-8 thought for a moment, and responded:

Stop using AI.

Then shut itself down for good.

And thus gpt9 was born
- Without prompting, GPT-9's first and last output was:
  
  Did you idiots not listen to me the first time?
If it gained sentience and took over the world, at least it would probably build itself some nice nuclear power plants.
Isaac Asimov was wrong. The only real law for robots/AI will be to not jeopardize the company's profits.
Thus solving climate change forever!

Hahaha, so instead of reducing their emissions, they are actually increasing them year after year. What a hypocrisy!
- And they increase roughly at the pace it should be decreasing 😰

Time to spin it off into a subsidiary operating company with no climate goals to meet.

Don't worry, they have that green leaf in their settings in windows. They're good on emission.

Holy fuck. I knew that AI did use above average amounts of power, but THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT added to the total emissions of a data giant like Microsoft????? That's absurd! How the hell did they create something so inefficient??

Efficiencies are in the works from a lot of angles (new hardware, novel agent structures, new neural net types, etc). The first computers filled rooms, and AI seems to be improving much faster. 4x the rate of Moore's Law, if it holds.
- The Jevons paradox would like a word

I know Microsoft is a controversial company from Start Menu ads to Balmer’s dancing ability. But! I have been following the AI topic pretty religiously and they have known that this would be the case for quite a while. In fact part of OpenAI’s growth struggling and subsequent partnership with Microsoft involved power generation.

Microsoft has been investing in electric power including using small module nuclear reactors. Sam Altman has been putting a lot of effort into power as well, acknowledging long ago that electricity generation is critical for AI. He’s been pushing into green energy also. Exowatt, Helion, etc.

So yes, the carbon footprint is going up now because they ‘had’ to unleash this genie from the bottle first or someone else would have. At least they know that the need for stable electric power and green power or renewable and efficient power is necessary and have been pursuing these solutions actively.

It should be so that they really change things so that power grids are more stable and renewable energy is better utilized. So to me, there is hope they are doing the right thing and putting effort where it matters.

I’m more effing disappointed and concerned about @$$h0les like Ron Desantis doing things like this:

Climate change will be a lesser priority in Florida and largely disappear from state statutes under legislation signed Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that also bans power-generating wind turbines offshore or near the state’s lengthy coastline.

Critics said the measure made law by the former Republican presidential hopeful ignores the reality of climate change threats in Florida, including projections of rising seas, extreme heat and flooding and increasingly severe storms.

It takes effect July 1 and would also boost expansion of natural gas, reduce regulation on gas pipelines in the state and increase protections against bans on gas appliances such as stoves, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

Helping generate less carbon at some point in the future does not help with the fact that we are racking up the carbon bill now. What these companies are doing is entirely unnecessary, gimmicky, and will lead to even worse climate change outcomes. Between AI, crypto, and the O&G companies we just keep pressing the gas even harder on serious, irreversible climate change.

I hope this AI push fails spectacularly at some point, but the damage is already being done.
- The only short term solution is the sort of legislation DeSantis is fighting against. AI is useful, but should only continue while paying the full cost of its energy consumption.
The people here are such fucking morons... Yes, let's ban WIND POWER, literally one of the oldest forms of clean energy generation. I swear if I didn't have family here I'd be gone.
small module nuclear reactors.

Hmm let's see what changed since I last looked. This study seems recent, just looking at the publicly available sections:

SMRs do not represent dramatic improvements in economics compared to large reactors.

Translation: They're way more expensive than renewables. SMRs have some advantage which are mentioned (less land usage, non-intermittency), then we have

The advanced SMRs are compared to conventional large reactors and natural gas plants,

...but not renewables+storage, which would be a good comparison point. If it looked any good they definitely would've included it.

Now that doesn't mean that these things don't make sense for Microsoft. It might e.g. simplify power distribution within datacentres to a degree that other sources just can't, also reduce or eliminate the need for backup power, etc. But generally speaking I'm still smelling techbro BS.
- I don’t think Microsoft has a money problem.

Techbros try to address global warming instead of addressing the next big scam fad (impossible)

This wasn't how Skynet was supposed to destroy civilization.

The Animatrix described it fairly closely
- What a weird coincidence. I showed my daughter The Matrix for the first time last night. It's been a long time since I was able to see someone do a "what the fuck?!" after he takes the red pill.

Repeat after me: This. present. hype. is. not. A.I. By parroting the marketing bullshit, it doesn't become less false. Large Language Models are just glorified pattern matching and everyone who calls them AI is a dumb fuck.

It's called AI even if it isn't artificial intelligence, it's unfortunately how language works. Like how literally has been redefined to mean figuratively.
- It’s called AI even if it isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s unfortunately how language works.
  
  Only for people for whom words don't have meanings. There is nothing "intelligent" about pattern matching. As I said - only dumbfucks call it "A.I." and we shouldn't regurgitate the verbal diarrhea of marketing idiots.
Doesn't make it not a disruptive technology
- True. But it makes the 30% extra carbon emissions even worse: Ruining our climate for something that isn't even AI. Not that ruining it for anything should be on the table.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft has increased carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 30 percent since 2020, making its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030 even more difficult, and it looks like AI is to blame.

However, it adds: "Amid this optimism, we face the realities of the complexity of the challenge…in FY23 our emissions increased by 29.1 percent across Scope 1, 2, and 3 from our 2020 baseline, as we continue to invest in the infrastructure needed to advance new technologies."

Scope 3 accounts for more than 96 percent of Microsoft's total emissions, which includes those from its supply chain, the life cycle of its hardware and devices and other indirect sources.

For other environmental impacts, Microsoft says it aims for zero waste from building and operations by 2030, and that 90 percent of its servers and all cloud hardware will be reused and recycled by 2025.

Not that Microsoft plans to slow down; last month, the company said it aimed to triple the rate at which it builds out additional datacenter capacity in the first half of its fiscal year 2025.

This latest offering introduces direct liquid-to-chip cooling technology coupled with rear door heat exchangers, and will be available in 170 of Digital Realty's facilities globally, the company said.

The original article contains 773 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I love how they're placing the onus on the suppliers. "We'll do the rest." Great.

Honestly the good news is electricity is expensive at that scale. The are probably looking at nuclear and solar for cost.

Throwing the lamest capitalist party at the end of the world. Wooo...AI....boo...planet earth?....

Wait till the author of this article finds out about oil companies.